Thursday, January 25, 2007

Traffuck

Let me ask you a question.If, while walking along sidewalk, possibly humming along with your IPod to Sloan’s Everything You’ve Done Wrong while dripping the last, little bits out of your double-double coffee into your gaping maw, and you saw a gigantic, 16-wheel flatbed truck trying to navigate a corner at the smallest of small-town intersections, would you:A) Stop, for no other reason than because you have the last vestiges of coffee-swill drooling down your chin and, depending on the angle you held your coffee cup, sticky, mucous-like sugary-cream pooling in your eye-sockets, making depth of vision a little bit difficult to discern;B) Stop, because the truck-driver is clearly in over his head at this intersection, trailing close to 15 tons of flattened metal & rubber around an intersection barely big enough to handle a crosswalk littered with school-kids, and the look on his face isn’t even a reasonable facsimile of the calm, cool detachment one would expect from the seasoned truck-driver who would laugh-off such a pickle in long, looping cackles in between drags off the cigarette he‘s holding in his sagging, illiterate mouth;C) Look the truck-driver directly in his face, walk out in front of his straining, severely-rotating front-end with a blitheness bordering on obliviousness, and as the incredulous truck-driver comes to a screeching stop, thus halting all intersection traffic, you, with the most vulgar scowl you could muster, throw your empty coffee-cup on the back of his flatbed, continuing on your walk, diagonally across said intersection, while throwing a vile glare and a vague shoulder-shrug at the beyond-words-enraged truck-driver.The answer, as I watched with my own two eyes this morning, is, astonishingly, C.